Tips to Grow Your Business

7 Essential Reasons to Update Your WordPress Plugins

Does it seem to you like your WordPress plugins constantly need updating? Every time I log in to my WordPress dashboard I see those pesky little reminders to update my plugins one more time. This article will shed some insight into why you want to spend a few minutes every week ensuring your plugins are up to date.

Before I get started with the 7 reasons, let me just share my personal story about all this. I launched my blog about a year and a half ago, and gradually went from no traffic to an average of 100-200 unique visitors a day using only organic traffic. I began to master some of the more advanced plugins and widgets available, and I also began to make money online.

At the end of the first year I did some free educational trainings, started growing my list, and made my first offer. I made over $3,000 offering my first product. It was turning out to be a great year for a newbie blogger.

Those Pesky Plugin Update Reminders!

I often wold log in and notice those pesky little reminders to update my plugins. I would just think “If I update it now, it will just need another update again tomorrow. Ill just wait”. So I started going for longer periods before worrying about updating my plugins.

Hitting the PANIC Button!

One of the biggest plugin issues to hit last year was the ‘Tim Thumb’ fiasco. ‘Tim Thumb’ was a plugin that helped manage your thumbnails and hackers successfully found and exploited a hack in it that would take over your thumb nails. The hack was often used to replace your thumbs with advertisements for porn or other content that wasn’t a great fit for my FamilyBusienssTips website.

The bottom line to the story is that it took my MONTHS to get rid of the hacks out of my blog. So at a time where I was about to go full time into my marketing, I had to stop and deal with this whole Tim Thumb issue. Needless to say that I really lost both money and valuable time.

My Lesson: Updating Your WordPress Plugins Saves You Time & Money

7 Reasons to Update Your WordPress Plugins

Bugs (or Errors) are often corrected with plugin updates. You may not be aware that the plugin isn’t working for 1 portion of your audience because they are using an iPad with the Firefox browser. Bugs are often reported by other bloggers and the plugin developer will release “fixes” in the next plugin update.

Plugin Updates may contain new and better functionality.

Some Plugin Updates create a better experience for your users.

Enhancements to your Plugin could make it run more efficiently and reduce the load time of your pages.

Some updates to WordPress may REQUIRE updates to your plugins or the plugin will cease to function. Be sure to check your plugins especially when updating WordPress itself. Installing a new version of WordPress may make

WordPress makes it easy to keep your plugins up to date. WordPress tells you when your plugins have updates and which ones. You can even flag them all for update at the same time and perform the updates in less than a minute.

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